MAMS faculty N. Gurski and J. Orendain have published a new book titled Compact Closed 2-Categories: Duality, Enrichment, and Strictification, together with colleague D. Yetter of Kansas State University, through De Gruyter Brill press.  Gurski and Yetter started a collaboration in early 2020 by trying to combine the philosophy of categorification with the celebrated Tannaka Reconstruction Theorem. Soon after Orendain joined CWRU as a Visiting Assistant Professor, the three spun off some of these ideas to form the backbone of this book, intertwining 3-dimensional category theory with enriched and symmetric monoidal 2-categories to present a comprehensive foundation for duals in dimension two.  A key innovation of this monograph is its focus on detailed diagrammatic methods via higher dimensional string or wire diagrams.

Graphical illustration of a wire diagram from Compact Closed 2-Categories: Duality,
Enrichment, and Strictification by N. Gurski, J. Orendain, and D. Yetter.

Gurski, who is an Associate Professor in the department, says the most exciting aspect of this work for him is “seeing a topic that we once thought of as a minor technical hurdle grow into an exciting piece of research with applications in a diverse collection of mathematical domains like algebra and logic.”

The book announcement may be found at: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783112188545/html

N. Gurski, J. Orendain, and D. Yetter.